As my colleague Daryl Plummer has put it: We’re at the end of the beginning phase of cloud computing.

As 2014 dawns, we’re moving into an era of truly mainstream adoption of cloud IaaS. While many organizations have already been using cloud IaaS for several years, gradually moving from development to production, with an ever-expanding range of use cases and applications, the shift to truly strategic adoption is just getting underway. Increasingly, organizations are asking what can’t go to the cloud, rather than what can.

Organizations that haven’t done at least a cloud IaaS pilot by now, however informal (“informal” includes that one crazy developer who decided to give his credit card to Amazon) are at the trailing edge of adoption. The larger the business, the more likely it is to be doing things in cloud IaaS; this is a trend that starts from enterprises and works its way down. (Technology companies of all sizes, of course, are comfortably ensconced in the cloud.)

Gartner’s clients with multiple years of cloud IaaS under their belts are now comfortably going towards more strategic adoption. What’s interesting, though, is that later adopters are also going towards strategic adoption — they’re skipping the years of early getting-their-feet-wet, and immediately jumping in with more significant projects, with more ambitious goals. That makes a great deal of sense, though — by this point, the market is more mature, and there are immediate and clear answers to practical issues like, “How do I connect my enterprise network?” (That one question, by the way, continues to benefit Amazon, which has a precise answer, versus the often-fuzzy or complex answers of other competitors who have less industrialized processes for doing so.)

I’ve said before that developers are the key to cloud IaaS adoption in most organizations. It’s also becoming clear that the most successful strategic efforts will be developer-led, usually with an enterprise architect as the lead for the organization-wide effort. It is the developers that have the strategic vision for the future of application development and operations, and that care about things like faster delivery (i.e., business agility), continuous integration, continuous deployment, application lifecycle management, and infrastructure as code. IT operations seems to almost inevitably be mired in thinking about solely their own domain, which tends to be focused on a data center view that effectively reduces to “how do we keep the lights on, at a lower cost?” This has a high probability of leading to solutions that might be right for IT operations, but wrong for the business.

At the moment, I’m writing research focused on best practices — the lessons learned from the trenches, from organizations who have adopted cloud IaaS over the last seven years of the market. I’m always interested in hearing your stories.